Verse of the Day for April 28

These two verses are usually quoted separately and they contradict each other if you do that.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling — that is verse twelve, and it sounds like everything depends on effort.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.

The for at the beginning joins them. You work out because God works in — the effort is evidence of the other thing, not a substitute for it.

And what God is said to produce is both to will and to do. The wanting as well as the doing.

That is the part worth holding onto in a month about renewal. If you have found yourself wanting to change — even faintly, even inconsistently — that desire is itself reported here as something God is working.

Nobody generates their own appetite for God. Its presence is already evidence of something at work.

The desire you have to be different did not originate with you. Paul says God produces the willing as well as the doing.

Treat the wanting as evidence rather than as pressure.